Silicon Valley is the strongest lobby for novelty and innovation. Even it struggles sometimes against the established laws and businesses.
1. John uploads a file and distributes the link. 2. Jane wants to download the file. She can do it freely (low speed, daily limits) or for a little fee (fast download, no limits). 3. Jane wants to download many files, so she signs up for a premium account. 4. John gets a comission from MegaUpload.
What happens if John uploads copyrighted material and drives sales for MegaUpload using pirated software and movies? Well...the file gets removed, but nothing else. He can continue doing it again and again, even uploading the same file again.
And this was going on on a massive scale, hundreds of people were earning several thousand dollars per month from this and -- according to court documents -- Kim was very much aware of this and even actively encouraged uploaders to supply copyrighted material to the system.
I think a lot less people have much of an opinion on unlicensed cabbies existing. AirBnB is a bit more controversial (anti-subletting clauses are there for neighbors more than for landlords, and NIMBY plays a role), but some people are cool with that so long as they trust their neighbor's judgement.
I do agree that the SV-ness of these two companies has helped immensely.
Kim's downfall is likely twofold:
1. Lack of Valley VCs with money saying what he's doing is good for the world.
2. The entertainment money lobby is very strong. I don't think there are taxi or anti-subletting lobbies of similar weight.
No, it's just that the taxi lobby is less powerful than Hollywood, and is less used to spreading mass-propaganda. Have you ever seen ads shouting "Driving an unlicensed cab is A FELONY!" before every piece of entertainment you consume? That's why you think "most people feel" this or that about copyright infringement. It has nothing to do with the actual matter or the intensity of "natural feelings" of Joe Average about this or that topic. After all, before Napster was sued, the overwhelming majority of any population had no qualms whatsoever about copying anything digital (computer programs etc), not unlike we all had no qualms about using Uber until cabbies revolted.
Napster/Mega/Uber/AirBnB all shared the commonality of enabling illegal practices on a scale previously deemed impossible. Whether this is a good thing or a bad one, it depends on individual categories, but there is no denying that they all share a fundamental challenge/disobedience of established laws.
We weren't born with an innate sense that is wrong to pay for certain types of digital copies; our rational economic instinct is to try and get the best bang for our buck, not to investigate whether the seller is actually allowed to sell us that particular bang. That is why contraband is as old as the world.
It was a constant stream of threats and propaganda from established interests that taught us that there is a "good copy" and a "bad copy" and people selling "bad copies" are unworthy of getting our money. Now it's natural to think that there is a line to draw, regardless of where you actually draw it. That line wasn't there before "they" told us to look for it.
For taxis and hospitality, this process of education/indoctrination has not happened, because there was no real need -- these matters were settled in law decades ago through the (mostly democratic) process, and that was it. Established interests could draw the line at any time with a couple of phone calls, because you can't hide a hotel or a cab for long; there was no need to involve the public, no need to divulge the finer points of hospitality law or to develop in their customers a critical approach to doing business in these markets like the entertainment industry was doing.
Now Uber and AirBnB are simply bypassing these established systems by using scale. They make infringers small enough and numerous enough to make enforcement unpractical on the ground, and use that as a lever to remove established systems of control. Incumbents are forced to ask the public to do the enforcement themselves, like the entertainment industry started doing so many years ago. So now more and more people know that there is a line to draw in those industries as well, but in numbers nowhere near what the entertainment industry amassed in almost 50 years of continuous advertisement of "bad practices". That doesn't mean that they don't have the exact same reasons of the entertainment industry: "the law says X and these people are doing Y, please make them stop". (In fact, they probably have even more reasons, since regulation of these industries has some foundation in actual threats to the public -- hotels with no emergency exit, drunk unlicensed drivers etc. -- whereas nobody ever died because of an unlicensed tape.)
If the copyright-topic wasn't an issue, this would be quite a nice business model (at least a kind of fair one).
But this revenuesharing thing encourages people to upload files for a mass audience, and that's the reason why this doesn't work.
What US competitors are safe? You mean I can easily share copyrighted movies with strangers on dropbox? I've never seen anyone do that.
Actually, this is very common. It works in exactly the same way as MegaUpload did - Señora Pirata uploads her ripped movies to Dropbox, and distributes the public link to strangers.
[0]http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/30/how-dropbox-knows-when-your...
A closer example is to compare it to youtube
DMCA Safe Harbor doesn't apply if you're complicit, IIRC.
Youtube, who spent millions developing a state-of-the-art image and sound recognition system (ContentID) so that copyrighted content could be detected and blocked by its holders?
I'm hoping the founders of Napster get early release from jail. They've done their time, surely.
Have you ever seen Kim engage in talks for a settlement? Would it even make sense for the industry to settle at this point? You think Sean Parker would still be a free man if he would just continued running Napster as it was?
(The Dread Pirate Roberts was also running an innovative business where users could exchange government restricted goods through a P2P system with a centralized registry, look where that got him)
There is a whole group of people sharing copyrighted movies via Google Drive, it happens all the time.
Some of the movies were accessed hundredthousands of times, and are still online after over a year.
Dropbox doesn't deserve the comparison, dropbox restrict sharing to make themselves unattractive for piracy. The similarities stop with "storing heaps of files".
[1] e.g. on the streaming video side megavideo they had a 72 minute per day limit on watching videos. On the download site you were throttled and made to jump through a bunch of hoops to download one file at a time for free. These were not nice sites.
Journalists' dream come true. They/we can project upon him and his actions whatever fits their/our agenda.
There will eventually be a movie about him.
I was honestly more amazed by Kim's online persona, because I never had any idea what he did. To be honest, I just saw awesome websites and a guy that looked like he was having fun being a software engineer/hacker. Then he launched the Ultimate Rally, a competitor to the Gumball 3000 race, which was all about fast cars driving across different countries in the world (Another awesome website). I think that was in the early 2000's and after that I've been watching him. Since the internet was largely anonymous, I never knew who he was or that he was falsifying his lifestyle.
His websites have long since been taken down, but they are still vivid in my mind.
But in any case, I think moral ambiguity is in the zeitgeist. Steve jobs, Walter White, Game of Thrones...